City Short-Staffed, Looks At Contractor To Evaluate Roads

The City of College Station says its public works department, which handles street maintenance, is short staffed. In order to figure out which streets need work, the city wants to hire a contractor for a second year in a row.

Kate Shafer is a south College Station resident who lives on Hartford Drive.

"The curbs seem to crumble easily. I've called them out to fix the corner since it has crumbled,” said Shafer.

The problems Shafer says she sees is something the city plans to fix this year thanks to data collected by a contractor. Usually the city's public works department inspects the streets, but in the past couple of years they've been dealing with being short staffed.

"We have to pull staff off crews from our streets, drainage, mowing and irrigation crews to get that done,” said Jeff Given with the city’s public works department.

The alternative is spending about $57,000 on a contractor who spends weeks scoring the streets based on many criteria.

"Ride is one of those things we look at. How bumpy or smooth it is,” said Given. "Using those scores from the street evaluation, that's where we start to build our maintenance plan where we try to balance out or be effective with our labor materials and equipment.”

Hartford Drive didn't score too well when the contractor evaluated the road last year, so this year the city has plans to repair it.

The public works department hopes the city will approve the contract again this year to allow an outside company to continue scoring the streets.

The city council will vote to approve the contract in Thursday's city council meeting.

The city of Bryan says they have designated someone in their public works department to evaluate their roads throughout the year.

Comments may be monitored for inappropriate content, but the station is under no legal obligation to do so.
If you believe a comment violates the above rules, please use the Flagging Tool to alert a Moderator.
Flagging does not guarantee removal.

Multiple violations may result in account suspension.
Decisions to suspend or unsuspend accounts are made by Station Moderators.
Questions may be sent to comments@kbtx.com.
Please provide detailed information.

Online Public Information File

Viewers with disabilities can get assistance accessing this station's FCC Public Inspection File by contacting the station with the information listed below. Questions or concerns relating to the accessibility of the FCC's online public file system should be directed to the FCC at 888-225-5322, 888-835-5322 (TTY), or fccinfo@fcc.gov.